5 Questions with Erika Valdivieso, author of “Empire’s Companion: Virgilian Epics from Colonial Iberoamerica.”
In Empire’s Companion: Virgilian Epics from Colonial Iberoamerica, Erika Valdivieso offers a study of how Latin poetry shaped colonial aspirations in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century South and Central America. We sat down to ask her some questions about how she became interested in this project and what she’s learned along the way.
What were the origins of the project?
I’m a classicist with family roots in Peru, and for a long time I thought my interests in antiquity and in Latin America had nothing to do with each other. My bookshelf was divided between the section on colonial literature and history, on the one hand, and another section with dictionaries of ancient Greek and Latin. Eventually, however, I found my way to books that merged those two interests. The work of scholars like Andrew Laird, María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, David Lupher, and Sabine MacCormack introduced me to classical reception in the colonial Americas, which I found so stimulating. I applied to graduate school to find out what I could about the role of Latin literature in the making of the Americas. Coursework and archival research showed me that there was a corpus of Latin written in Spanish and Portuguese America, the majority of it almost completely unknown. Empire’s Companion is a first step towards making sense of the Latin archives of the Americas, one which I hope readers will find as fascinating as I do.
What do you hope readers will take away from the book? How have your own thoughts evolved as a result of your work?
Readers will know something that still amazes specialists in Latin American literature and classical studies: a lot of Latin was written in Iberoamerica. For some reason, the Americas are often treated as radically separate from the art and culture of early modernity, especially when it comes to classical reception. The truth is that many of the colonial elites received exactly the same education as that of their peers in Europe and that the fruits of this education were equally rich. I hope the reader sees the four epics analyzed in this book as proof of that central point. This realization, in turn, helps us reframe Spanish and Portuguese America as contributors to a global early modern culture.
Working on Empire’s Companion has helped me appreciate the pragmatic purpose of these epics, which construct radically different visions of empire. When I first read them, I wanted to locate a redemptive arc, assuming that, since these epics were written in the colonies, they would denounce the excesses of empire. This impulse in part stems from the way classicists read Virgil’s Aeneid, attentive to the many voices that complicate the epic’s imperial agenda. Early modern authors, by and large, did not study the Aeneid in the same way we do; for them, following ancient tradition, the poem praises the emperor August without reservation. The four authors I study in this book were no exception to that trend. When they imitated Virgil, they did so to contribute to the ongoing imperial projects of their own time and place. Despite having the same model and the same goal, what I found was that these authors produced a variety of themes, approaches to colonial realities, and even style. The texts are so rich and diverse that they exceed the question of pro- or anti-imperial sympathies, showing the many ways poetry could build and destroy colonial worlds.
While you were working on this project, what did you learn that surprised you the most?
As I was finishing the book, a colleague sent me a picture of an item on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: a lacquerware tray or batea from eighteenth-century Mexico. Measuring forty-two inches in diameter, the batea is painted with decorative vegetal motifs and inset vignettes. The central medallion shows scenes from the ninth book of the Aeneid: Turnus attacking the Trojans and a night raid against the Latins. It’s not common to find depictions of Trojans in colonial art, but what made the batea especially exciting were its origins and provenance. The tray is attributed to an Indigenous artist, José Manuel de la Cerda, and was commissioned by the vicereine of New Spain, María Josefa de Acuña y Prado. As I discuss in the book, Latin education was the preserve of elite men of “pure” European descent in the colonies. But the batea shows that the story of Aeneas may have circulated more widely and through media that transcended the written form. Empire’s Companion is just the starting point for a richer history of the reception of the Aeneid in Spanish and Portuguese America, one that incorporates perspectives and voices missing from the Latin epics studied in this book. And that’s why I’m delighted we could use the batea on the cover of my book, because it invites us to imagine the multiple meanings of the Aeneid in Iberoamerica.
Where will your research and writing take you next?
While I was working on Empire’s Companion, I came across Latin poems from Brazil on gold mining, tobacco, and sugar. These were clearly written in the georgic mode, but they broke with classical convention by talking explicitly about the labor of slaves. Reading more broadly across the tradition, however, I realized that this so-called exception was actually a hallmark of georgics written in the slave-driven economies of the Americas: the Anglo-Caribbean, Mexico, and Brazil. My next project uses a multi-lingual poetic corpus to trace the history of these Atlantic georgics, their aesthetic meditations on and moral challenges to chattel slavery, and their participation in the codependent construction of blackness and whiteness. A fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies will support the early stages of this new project – stay tuned.
What’s the best book you’ve read lately?
If you like a sweeping tale, may I recommend Moby-Dick? I long avoided Melville’s whaling saga, assuming that it would be boring. I could not have been more wrong. The book has hilarious moments and chapters that are profoundly moving. The story unfolds across the world’s oceans, the prose is excellent, the whale sublime. I don’t think there’s a better summer read!
Erika Valdivieso is assistant professor of classics and a member of the Early Modern Studies Program at Yale University. Her book, Empire’s Companion, is available now! Save 30% when you use the code UCPNEW at checkout on our site.